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Distinguishing Sensitive and Insensitive Options for the Winograd Schema Challenge

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Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2023)

Abstract

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) is a popular benchmark for commonsense reasoning. Each WSC instance has a component that corresponds to the mention of the correct answer option of the two options in the context. We observe that the answers of many instances are insensitive to the options. In this paper, based on this observation, we propose an approach based on fine-tuning the pre-trained language model for WSC by distinguishing sensitive and insensitive options. First, we split WSC instances into option-sensitive and insensitive categories, and use option expanding and option masking strategies to weaken the options so that the model does not pay attention to options when they are insensitive during fine-tuning. Second, we treat the two categories as intermediate-task of each other, and use transfer learning to improve the performance. We fine-tune BERT-Large and T5-XXL with our approach on WINOGRANDE, a new dataset of WSC, and the experiment shows our method outperforms baselines by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art, which indicates the effectiveness of our instance-distinguishing strategy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/allenai/mosaic-leaderboard/tree/master/winogrande/evaluator.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Project of China (No. 2021ZD0110700).

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Correspondence to Jintao Tang or Ting Wang .

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Li, D. et al. (2023). Distinguishing Sensitive and Insensitive Options for the Winograd Schema Challenge. In: Wang, X., et al. Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13945. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_52

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30675-4_52

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-30675-4

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